That reign is now over.
And July 12, 2023 is a day that will go down in infamy.
Considering that I named Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers my second favorite film of the previous decade, you'd think I would have acquainted myself with his entire filmography as a director by now. In fact, that isn't all that close to being the case.
Setting aside films he only wrote -- Kids -- the only films he'd directed that I'd seen were Gummo, The Beach Bum and the aforementioned Breakers. I liked the first and third and hated the second. (I didn't much care for Kids but at least I have a grudging respect for it.)
That left a whole three Korine-directed films I hadn't seen: Julien Donkey-Boy (1999), Mister Lonely (2007) and Trash Humpers (2009). (There's also a 2003 "television documentary," as it's described on Wikipedia, called Above the Below, but movies that debuted on television 20 years ago, before the streaming era, present categorization issues for me. So I'm going to set that one aside.)
It was last night, a fateful Wednesday night in July -- a winter night here in Australia -- that I encountered Trash Humpers on MUBI, and threw it on due to its 77-minute brevity.
This was not my first awareness of Trash Humpers. Unlike Mister Lonely, which I had not heard of until a friend mentioned it in the context of Korine's career during a mid-movie message chat, Trash Humpers was a piece of toxic cinematic sludge (or so I assumed) that crept into my awareness possibly through an Entertainment Weekly review at the time it came out. Indeed, in googling it I am seeing that Owen Gleiberman was the critic, and though I'm not going to re-read his review now, the F he gave it stands out clearly in my memory.
Is there such a thing as an F minus?
Before I start tearing into Trash Humpers, I have to start by stating a couple things clearly.
It's hard to ever really be sure that a movie you are watching is the worst you have ever seen. A while ago, I made a policy not to add a movie to my Flickchart until 30 days after I'd seen it, to calm my initial feelings, positive or negative, and gain enough perspective to rank it properly. A movie that moves you greatly or angers you greatly may settle into something more even-keeled upon a month of reflection.
The second thing to state is that there is arguably something positive and useful about a movie that angers you. In this line of thinking, anything that stimulates a strong response is doing something right, either because to anger you was the filmmaker's intention (meaning they succeeded in what they set out to do) or because it is hitting close to home in some way that warrants introspection in the viewer. These are both within the broadly outlined goals of art. In this line of thinking, a person's least favorite film of all time should actually be the most lame, the most cynical or the most technically disastrous movie they'd ever seen, not the one that they found the most off-putting.
All I can say for sure, though, is that if I were to add Trash Humpers to my Flickchart today, it would lose its duel to Twentynine Palms.
What exactly is so God-awful egregious about this movie?
Well, the poster above should tell you a lot about what the experience of watching this movie feels like. These two "characters" -- men in masks/makeup to make them look elderly -- join a third female character (played by Korine's wife, Rachel, who is also in Spring Breakers) to form this film's trio of "protagonists." I call them "characters" because they are not developed beyond their tendency to make humping motions at trash cans, trees and other inanimate objects, smash and shatter television sets and plastic dolls, and engage in other general mayhem. They do occasionally speak but more often they communicate in rooster sounds.
Their narrative-free existence involves occasionally rubbing elbows with other characters -- some of them children, some of them prostitutes, some of them other Leatherface-like rednecks without the makeup -- and engaging in conversations (the other characters usually do the talking) that involve acts of debauchery and discussions of genitalia. The language is foul and discriminatory (there's even a warning on MUBI about discriminatory language) and the net result of any scene is nothing close to a lucid commentary on whatever that passage of the film is supposed to be about. These scenes take place in desolate parking lots, rubbish-strewn alleyways and squalid apartments. Violence and sex are simulated almost constantly. The whole thing is captured in grainy VHS, even showing on-screen VCR text like PLAY and PAUSE now and again as the whole thing lags and emits static.
To give you one idea of a scene that stuck out to me from this mess -- actually one of the tamer scenes -- two men pretend to be twins conjoined at the head with some sort of getup involving panty hose. They squirt a bunch of dish detergent on top of pancakes and eat them while the other characters dance around and chant "Make it don't fake it!" Whatever that means.
I know I am precisely the sort of square Korine is trying to make squirm with these emptiest of empty provocations. Or at least I am playing this role in my distaste for the movie. The thing is, Korine should know that I like a movie he made that isn't so far off from this, Gummo, just for some slight tweaks in the sympathy of his camera and the minute adjustment in his approach to capture a possibly real subsection of the American population. The trash humpers are something out of a non-existent fantasy of depravity, and there is nary a moment of trying to excavate anything redemptive.
I should stick an asterisk next to that, but it's really more of an example of that problematic adage "the exception that proves the rule." Korine closes the film -- it's no spoiler to tell you about the closing scene of this sort of movie -- with an image of the wrinkly female played by Rachel Korine, singing a lullaby to a baby in a carriage on a desolate street lit by sickly lamplight. This seems like an attempt to soften the blow of what we've been watching. But there is nothing empathetic in the character's face as it is still just this saggy makeup/mask that makes this character look like something out of a nightmare. And since we don't know who this baby is, nor do we have any more sense of a progression of narrative than we do in any other scene, it doesn't do anything except identify that Korine knows this has all been too much, and that he has to finish with something that might be considered uplifting from a certain point of view. (The too muchness, some would argue, is the point.)
The other hesitation I have in calling this the worst movie I've ever seen, which speaks to my earlier concerns about labeling it this, is a conversation I had during the movie with the friend I mentioned earlier. (And if you think carrying on a conversation on Facebook while this movie is going on means you have any lesser chance of experiencing what it is providing, you are seriously misunderstanding what it's like to watch this movie, try as I might to explain it.)
My friend loves Spring Breakers as much as I do, but he has a limited love for Korine's entire career for the way it demonstrates this man's progression as an artist. He agrees that there is the immature provocateur in Korine, but he also believes Korine has a vision for demonstrating "something" -- some portrait of the margins that would probably represent selling out to the bourgeois mainstream if it were any bit more accessible than it is. The point is that we're supposed to hate it, but I suppose also that we are supposed to interrogate why we hate it, and this is part of its value. It provokes something in us, which most films do not, and the more raw and unprocessed that is, the better it is doing its job.
This may all be. And in a month's time -- really more than a month before I get to it -- it may not lose that duel to Twentynine Palms. Which might mean writing a post in which I call it the worst film I've ever seen is premature.
But the reality is, when you have seen nearly 6,500 films, the occasion of watching what might be the worst film you've ever seen is one that requires written reflection -- especially if you write a movie blog.
And the fact remains that I just find Trash Humpers to be chaos for chaos' sake, nihilism for nihilism's sake, trash for trash's sake.
If I were to conjure up an artistic justification for this film, the closest I might get is that Korine wanted to make an apparently found footage version of the way human beings acted in the early 21st century, if for some reason this were the only document aliens recovered upon arriving on a decimated planet Earth 500 years from now.
And he just thought it would be funny to punk the aliens.
Just four days ago I added another half-star movie -- the lowest rating you can give without it looking like you just forgot to rate it at all -- to my Letterboxd. That's the new Netflix film The Out-Laws, the review of which you can read here if you are interested in watching me go off on a movie.
It has a decent chance of being my worst movie of 2023, and I felt for sure it would be my worst movie of July, which is also something I keep track of (along with my best each month).
But it doesn't stand a chance against the worst movie I've ever seen -- at least for now.
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